Another Conversation with My 3 Year Old

"Hi M! How was your day?!"
"I'm NOT E-"
"Hi Cinderella!
"I'm NOT Cinderella"
"Hi Sleeping Beauty"
"I'm NOT sleeping Beauty"
"But grumpy this evening?"
"NO! I'm NOT Grumpy. Or Sleepy, or Bashful, or Doc, or any of them. I'm NOT a dwarf"
"Hi Arial"
"I'm NOT Arial. Mummy, I'm not talking to Daddy TONIGHT!"
"Hi princess"
"Oh, Daddy! Hello! Today we saw Grandma and Autnie J and we went for lunch and B- was crying and Mummy had to tell her to stop and we went to the shops and it was..."

Initial Thoughts About the IMF

I don't really know much about the IMF, outside of they're coming meaning we're in a whole pile of trouble. But, on reading the comments and papers and watching the news, I do have some reflections I'd like to share, both good and bad. I'll start with the bad in the hope that this ends on a good note.

The Bad

• The humiliation and shame we feel about the IMF being in the country. Well, it is tough. And I suppose humiliating. But we did bring it on ourselves. We'd like to think Fine Fail brought this on us, but the fact is, their economic policies were being questioned in various corners since Charlie McCreevy's "What I have, I spend" comment. Elections since then appear to have based on the electorate being willingly deluded that money was free, and like trees, would simply grow. Children who convince their parents they can have another chocolate at Christmas. Parents who just want the peace to get on with Trivial Pursuit, say 'Go ahead'; children get sick and think "How could they do this to me"
• This business of the beggars on Stephen's Green being an iconic image of the trouble we're now in (here it is). Well, this is where you should feel shame. I first started spending a lot of time in Dublin from about 1994/1995. People were begging there then. They have been begging there ever since. If you have only noticed them now, well, shame on you. Perhaps it's a sign of just how blinkered the society was that nobody noticed them before.
• We should feel humiliated and ashamed of our politicians. The hiding away of the Green party and the Fine Fail back benchers rattling their sabres feels plain wrong to me. Both these groups voted for the bank guarantee (rightly or wrongly - I'm not questioning the guarantee right now, though I think I did over on the Fat Man blog a while ago), which appears to be the primary cause of our current serious troubles. Sure, they're political creatures and they have to survive, but I'd like to see a bit more backbone. Say "We got it wrong", apologise and try to move on. Stop trying to pretend there were always various factions at play after voting along party lines for years.  On the other hand, we have Dick Roche boasting that they're playing poker with the IMF - which seems such a level of hubris that he must be completely unaware of what the rest of us are thinking and feeling.
• I don't know where I sit with the whole "Is this what they died for?" bit. Frankly, it feels to me like we're feeling so angry and depressed we want to be moreso. But with news not getting much worse for us, we've turned to our history to try and resurrect some of that old misery we used to love so much.

The Good

• I welcome the return of humour to Irish political discourse. Our dark humour and dampened spirits have exceeded themselves in the delivery of razor sharp wit and observation of the society within which we have found ourselves.
• Someone had to put on the brakes. This is a good/bad point, but let's look at it as a good point. We have been overspending for years; and we have been running the country on unsustainable taxes raised from one-off projects (construction) and similar deals (business activity). How we thought this could just go on forever is absurd, unless the government brought in 15 year destruction orders or something
• Following on from that, we appear to have gained some sense in ourselves. And, perhaps of ourselves. Perspective you might call it. Well done us. Hopefully this will lead to a more independent electorate: the end of voting on party lines for family reasons. The beginning of a more rigorous consideration of what it is that political parties stand for; and what their policies might mean. I recall a debate in the UK sometime round the early 2000's where someone snidely cut across a panel member, saying "But you're going to vote Lib Dems - and they want to raise your taxes!" to which the other person replied "Yes, and that's how they'll pay for a better public service. I still don't know how the Tories or Labour intend to do that." Wise thinking indeed.

A Conversation With My 3 Year Old Daughter

"Peppa Pig?"
"No, that's boring for girls."
"Aladdin?"
"No, that's boring for girls."
"Teletubbies?"
"Daddy! That's only for BABIES"
"Shrek?"
"Daddy! That's only for BOYS!!"
"Dora?"
"No, that's boring for girls."
"Tinkerbell"
"Yes! That's PERFECT for girls! How did you know?"

Before a Storm

The air heavy. Heat around your skin; radiated like flesh torn or battered. The sky is metallic, dark, bruised with rolling clouds, ready to bleed. Sun there, far away, mendacious. Pushing, squeezing. Can’t pierce the bruises. Shouldn’t be counted. It’s not a sunny disposition.
The earth pants in exhausted billows of cut grass and leaf. The ground sweats.
The world taut.
Something is going to give.

Mo Leaba: A Derivative Account of Child-Induced Insomnia

I am in my own room. It is where I live now. With my wife and two children. I am sleeping, or trying to. My children, whom I assume to have read Beckett are punishing us. Perhaps for bringing them to this damnable world, but who knows? This has been going on for weeks now.
I don’t know how it started. They say when you dream, your brain processes all your memories - taking your RAM and dumping it to storage for later retrieval. Except we haven’t had any sleep. One or other of these lucky ladies will wake. And when they do, crashing from their dreams into the silent dark of their rooms, they will scream. Scream!
Then, my wife or I will run. Run! To try and settle the unsettled child, who will continue with sobs. We didn’t always wait up all night for one of them to wake. But when we didn’t wait up - the one to wake would surely start the other.
Whichever one it is, if she doesn’t wake the other, we will bring her into our room to settle her there with hugs and bottles and all the other weapons in our young-parent armoury of love.
If it is Sunshine, she will clutch her baby Susie, fall asleep in three minutes. With somnolent shifts, she will move to a horizontal position, kicking one parent in the head, while the other’s hair is pulled and tangled. We get little sleep, sore heads and stiff backs.
If it is Starlight, she will be true to her name, shining on through the night. She will not settle in our bed. She believes it to be playtime. We curse ourselves and the attention we give her.  She gurgles and giggles and climbs on us and stands up there in the middle of the bed. We have a series of minor heart attacks as she rages against the brightening of the light - when - as day breaks and the earth wakes - she will decide to sleep. When I have to go to work. When my wife has to look after Sunshine and her little cousin, Tinysmiles. But these are distractions - work, care. These are things we do when we are not in our room, which is where we live now.
At first we told ourselves we’ve been through this before. The sleeplessness. The cries that wake us in the night. But then, we realise, back then, we only knew half of it. There are two now.
We are insensate. The world is inexorable. We are not in it, nor of it. We do not touch it or move it. We are ideas. Words waiting to be said. Stories waiting to be told. We cannot escape it. Our children have taken our place.
They are in our room. It is where they live now. They turn us and roll us and command us. The progeny discipline the parents. A new order.
“Something must be done” I tell my wife. She looks at me hopefully, like I am going to do something. But I cannot. There is darkness and silence, but no sleep. One child kicking my face, the other dancing in the space between my wife and I. So much in the spaces between light and dark. So much in the space between words and actions. But something must be done. Someone should do something.
“Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.” (Beckett)